Patong Beach

Patong Beach on the Thai resort island of Phuket certainly has its fair share of sleazy bars. If I had a hundred baht for every fat foreign bloke in a wife-beater I saw sitting on a bar stool with one hand glued to a bottle of Singha beer, the other hand glued to the thigh of the young Thai lass on the stool next to him, and his eyes glued to the footie playing on the bar's flat screen TV, well, I'd be several hundred baht richer. And this is in the middle of the day. Heaven knows what it's like at night.

Actually, I probably would have spent the money shopping. Or on a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. That's another thing Patong Beach is famous for. The shopping. They sell everything from T-shirts and hats to DVDs and sunglasses. At first I didn't realise you had to barter. So I probably spent way too much on stuff to begin with. But I soon got the hang of it, and ended up getting a real good deal on some of those Bay-Ran sunglasses. Just like the ones Michael J. Fox wore in that movie Big Lights Bright City.

That was a great movie, by the way, except I didn't really understand the bit at the end where the Michael J. Fox character swaps his Bay-Rans for a loaf of bread. I mean Bay-Rans are worth a lot more than a loaf of bread. Even second hand ones. Maybe it was just to emphasise how much of a loser he was. He sure couldn't barter.

Kunzru on Herzog and Haneke

In two separate pieces for the Guardian (one a couple of years old), one of my favourite novelists, Hari Kunzru, assesses the films of two of my favourite directors: Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke. Enjoy!

Buzzing

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of Sacha Baron Cohen playing Saddam Hussein in a movie adaptation of a novel penned by the late Iraqi dictator, but I'm still reeling from the news, first revealed to me in this article on the Guardian website about the current obsession with fact-based movies and novels (Is the concentration on reality stopping writers using the imagination for storytelling?), that Baron Cohen is playing Freddie Mercury in a biopic of the Queen front man. Due out in 2012 apparently.

Speaking of buzzing, I'm off to Sydney tomorrow to see the Tomasz Stanko Quintet. Hoping the concert's as good as the one put on by Stanko's quartet in Wellington a couple of years ago. Back on Saturday.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo

As I've alluded to previously, it was as a result of seeing a documentary about him (Burden of Dreams) and learning of his passion for walking that I first became interested in the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Only later, after seeing Encounters at the End of the World at a film festival, did I become a fan of his documentaries. Since then I've watched Grizzly Man, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, and most recently, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Until a few weeks ago, however, I'd only seen two of his features (Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans), neither of which I really enjoyed. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down the other day to watch one of Herzog's first features, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a DVD of which I borrowed from a friend.

The opening sequence alone, shot near Machu Picchu on the side of a mountain with a sheer vertical drop of 600 metres, is, as they say, well worth the price of admission. And Klaus Kinski is anything but dull. Some of the other cast members, however, are not so convincing, perhaps understandably so given they're not professional actors. This amateurishness extends to other aspects of the production. But then Aguirre, the Wrath of God was shot on a budget of just US$370,000, a third of which went to Kinski (apparently he demanded another US$1 million to come into the studio to dub his own dialogue, forcing Herzog to hire another actor to do his dialogue instead). Amazingly, it was all shot on a single 35-mm camera, which, according to Herzog, he stole from what is now the Munich Film School.

A decade after the release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog returned to the jungles of Peru to make another feature, Fitzcarraldo, this time with a budget of US$6 million and a number of famous actors. But to say things didn't quite go to plan would be a gross understatement. Both Jason Robards, who was cast in the title role of an obsessed opera fan who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle, and Mick Jagger, who was cast as Fitzcarraldo's "retarded actor sidekick", had to pull out midway through filming, Robards due to illness (his doctor in the United States forbade him to return) and Jagger due to Rolling Stones touring commitments. Herzog himself briefly considered playing the part of Fitzcarraldo, but in the end he called on his old "friend", Klaus Kinski.

Central to the story of Fitzcarraldo is the transportation of a 340-ton ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog insisted on shooting this part of the film on location using a real ship and old-fashioned technology (pulleys and cables), and the problems this created helped establish his reputation as a megalomaniacal film director with little regard for the safety of his cast and crew. Herzog emphatically denies that anyone was ever at risk while the ship was being pulled over the mountain. And contrary to popular belief, no one was killed on the film set, although one extra drowned after stealing a boat and capsizing it on a river.

In Herzog on Herzog, Herzog explains the decision to use a real boat as follows:

I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over. I cannot confirm this, maybe it is a legend, but I do very much like this story...

...Nowadays even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect and even how the shot is done. I remember when the film was shown in Germany there was shouting from the audiences at the moment when the boat was hoisted up on to the mountain. Little by little they realized that this was no trick.

George Meegan

While surfing the net the other day I came across this list of people who have walked, or are in the process of walking, around the world. Coming in at number five is George Meegan.

Strictly speaking, Meegan didn't walk around the world. He does, however, hold the record for the longest unbroken walk, established when he journeyed on foot some 30,600km from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America to the northern tip of Alaska. The walk took him six years and eight months, during which time he married his Japanese fiancee, Yoshiko Matsumoto, and fathered two children.

Some two decades after Meegan completed his epic walk, the elder of these two children, Ayumi Meegan, traveled to San Fransisco where she met Tyler MacNiven (who later gained fame - and half of the one-million-dollar prize money - as co-winner of season nine of The Amazing Race). MacNiven fell in love with Ayumi, and in an effort to impress her (and no doubt her father), he hatched a plan to walk the length of Japan. He completed his walk in 2004 and later made an hour-long documentary about his exploits, Kintaro Walks Japan, which can be viewed at Google Video.

Today, George Meegan shares his time between England and Japan, where he holds a position as associate professor at the Graduate School of Maritime Sciences at Kobe University. He stood as an independent candidate in the recent UK General Election, campaigning on a platform of reforming the education system, which he regards as ignoring the needs of children who don't fit into the school system.

George Meegan makes a brief appearance part way through Kintaro Walks Japan. His intensity and his enthusiasm for walking are plain to see, but he doesn't seem entirely comfortable. In an earlier interview on Larry King Live, an excerpt of which is included in Kintaro Walks Japan, he comes across as confident and media savvy, yet an article in Backpacker magazine from the late-1980s describes him as having a distaste for publicity. He appears to be something of an enigma. Perhaps not "out of his mind" (as suggested in the same Backpacker article), but definitely an eccentric.

Distance walked since last post: 6km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 53.7km
Days left until departure: 89

Spartan

Excerpts from one-star customer reviews of David Mamet's Spartan on Amazon:

The clever dialog turns to just plain non-sense. The plot is just jumbled weirdness. The wonderful actors talents are wasted.

The entire film was utterly painful to watch, and the dialogue seemed like it was written by a retarded monkey.

Despite the confusion and frightful lines, devoid of any humor or humanity whatever, the plot is so flimsy that the general idea emerges quite easily.

The dialogue gets so fast and furious at points that, if it weren't for the all the frequent repetitions, you'd have to be rewinding all the time to hear what was said.

Mamets lauded dialoge makes Judge Dredd look like Alexander Hamilton.

The acting is stilted and disjointed to start. The diaglog is as banal as it gets, and most of the time it doesn't even make any sense. The scenes jump from one to another with no intelligible transitions.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen. The writing was ridiculous. It gave me creepy chills it was so bad.

Single-threaded storyline (...), characters and dialog that manage to be both cliche and unrealistic, lack of development makes many of the characters interchangable.

Preposterous plotting aside, this movie was a waste in pretty much every other regard -- the acting is uniformly mannered and dull, the dialog is a hackneyed, unnecessary rehash of Mamet's trademark circular/repetitive verbiage, and the tough-guy posturing is just plain lame

To say that David Mamet is an utter thumping no-talent is to gravely insult no-talents. This movie is so bad it would be inappropriate for me to explain what is bad about it.

This has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. The story is interesting but the dialog and acting is absolutely dreadful.

I could only handle watching about half this movie before i ejected it. Just the wooden way the dialogue was delivered by Kilmer and the unbelievability of the film was enough to drive me crazy.

The characters funtions were hard to follow, the scenario was completely unbelievable, the acting was stilted, and the writing was very poor.

I just don't understand all of the positive reviews of this movie. Val Kilmer's performance is so over-exagerrated, and so is the rest of the cast, especially the young lady who is begging to be put on the mission.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 47.7km
Days left until departure: 93

The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

The Road

A couple of weeks ago I asked my sister if she wanted to go and see the movie The Road. I remembered she'd read and enjoyed the book, by Cormac McCarthy, and I think we'd even talked about the movie and the excellent reviews it was getting. So I was a bit surprised when she told me she didn't really want to see it. The reason she gave was that she thought she'd find it too depressing.

I first heard of McCarthy when the movie No Country for Old Men came out (he also wrote the novel on which that movie was based), but I only really became interested in reading his work after he was mentioned several times in Don Watson's American Journeys, the book about traveling around the United States by rail which I read last December. This story about McCarthy auctioning his old typewriter, which appeared in various newspapers at around the same time, further piqued my interest.

Anyway, since my sister wasn't keen to see the movie of The Road, I decided to read the book. I found a copy of it on the shelves at the public library and finished reading it the other day. It is very dark, although like American Rust, the novel I read last year in which the protagonists seem to wander from one hopeless situation into another, it was saved by an ending that, while not exactly happy, does provide some hope. Now that I'm used to McCarthy's quirky style of writing (he omits apostrophes in negative contractions like hadnt and isnt and doesn't use quotation marks for speech) I might see if the library has any of his other novels.

What a cute little dog

On the whole, Mrs Fool and I have quite different tastes in movies. This can make deciding what to see whenever we want to see a movie or DVD together difficult. Over the years I've learnt a trick or two to get Mrs Fool to watch something she wouldn’t otherwise watch. One of these is to highlight an aspect of a movie I know will appeal to her. So when I wanted to take her to see Encounters at the End of the World, for example, all I had to do was mention there were penguins in it and she was hooked.

Although not quite on the same level as her adoration of penguins, Mrs Fool is also a big fan of Juliette Binoche, which is how I got her to agree to watch Hidden a few months ago. Ever since then I've wanted to watch more of Michael Haneke's work. While at Alice in Videoland the other day I came across another Michael Haneke movie starring Juliette Binoche. Mrs Fool didn’t really enjoy Hidden, so instead of saying, "Hey look, here's an obscure European art house movie by the same guy who made that weird move without an ending we saw the other month," I said, "Hey look, here's a French movie with your favourite actress, Juliette Binoche." And so it was that a couple of Saturdays ago we sat down to watch Code Unknown.

Judging from Mrs Fool's reaction after watching Code Unknown, I think I'm going to have to come up with another trick to get her to watch movies I want to see. In fact I'm pretty sure her words were the same as those she muttered after watching Hidden: "Yoku wakaranai." ("I didn't really understand that.") To be perfectly honest, there were things about Code Unknown I didn't understand. There were also things about Hidden I couldn't work out at first, but at least in the case of that movie I was able to make sense of it over the following days. Nearly a fortnight after seeing Code Unknown, I'm still unsure what Haneke was trying to say in the movie.

Strangely enough, this doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. In fact I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed the artistry of each scene, including the one with no dialogue in which Juliette Binoche stands doing her ironing, and the one in which the farmer and his son sit at a table eating stewed beets, in which the only line of dialogue is, "Beets. That's all there is." I enjoyed the climactic last scene with the drumming in the background (Haneke doesn't use background music in his films). And I enjoyed trying to piece all the scenes in the movie together in my head in a way that would give me a clue as to what the movie was about (other than the overall theme of communication, or rather miscommunication, discernible from the title).

I was thinking about this while walking back from the supermarket the other day, and decided that there are lots of examples of art that we can enjoy and appreciate on certain levels without necessarily fully understanding the intentions or thought processes of its creators. I love looking at a lot of Cezanne's paintings, but I have no real idea why he chose to paint the things he did in the way he did or what he was hoping to achieve in painting them. And how many people who enjoy looking at paintings by the old masters are aware of the religious and other symbolism these artists employed?

Four documentaries

Before Monday's medical meltdown I managed to watch all the documentaries I'd borrowed from Alice in Videoland last week. I began with Herzog's Wheel of Time (2003), which was just beautiful. Some people have criticized Herzog for embarking on this project without adequate knowledge of the subject matter (Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular the Kalachakra initiations), but personally I found his approach, which resembled that of an impartial observer, and the quirky questions he directed at the Dalai Lama extremely engaging. Visually the movie was stunning, with lots of lingering close-ups of devotees' faces, fascinating footage of the creation (and destruction) of the Kalachakra sand mandala, and a bonus segment about the pilgrimage at Mount Kailash.

I was slightly underwhelmed by the three Wim Wenders documentaries. The first, Tokyo-Ga (1985), was my favourite, mainly because it was shot in Tokyo just a year before I first went to Japan and so felt extremely nostalgic. Much of the footage (of pachinko parlors, of golf driving ranges, of driving along neon-lit streets at night, for example), I found a bit clichéd, although I must admit I did enjoy the scenes inside the factory making wax food samples for use in restaurant display windows. The scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower was unsubtitled, so I'm none the wiser as to what he was on about. The film included an interview with Atsuta Yuharu, who spent practically his entire career working as the cinematographer for Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro (a hero of Wenders'). Atsuta explained how Ozu stuck to just one lens and eventually dispensed with tracking and panning altogether, preferring to film from a fixed position less than a metre off the ground. Normal tripods wouldn’t go this low, so a special tripod had to be built. Atsuta became quite emotional as he reminisced about his career with Ozu, and eventually had to ask Wenders to stop filming.

One final comment on Tokyo-Ga. At one point in the movie I think Wenders comments that Tokyo is a city best captured on video as opposed to film (the relationship between these two is a theme that crops up in all three Wenders docos), but looking at the footage of early-1980s Tokyo it struck me as still a very analogue city. There was neon, but none of the huge video screens you see on the sides of buildings throughout Tokyo now, and even the pachinko machines seemed very mechanical compared to the ones you see today (not that I'm an expert or anything). I was reminded of how much Tokyo has changed over the 25 or so years I've known it.

Fashion designer Yamamato Yohji, the subject of the second Wenders documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), came across as a very nice chap, but apart from the nice shots of Paris from the top of the Pompidou Centre, that's about all I remember about this rather uninspiring biopic. Perhaps it would have been more inspiring if the entire cast (designer, assistants, models) weren't dressed in black all the time.

The premise behind the third and final Wenders doco, Room 666 (1982), was certainly interesting. Wenders was concerned about the future of cinema, and so he went to Cannes during the 1982 Film Festival, hired a hotel room (room 666 was the only one available!), set up a camera and a piece of paper with a list of questions, and invited some of the world's leading film directors to go in and film their responses. In an earlier post I noted how to me movie directors often come across as extremely articulate and knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects when interviewed, so I was looking forward to the results of Wenders' experiment.

First up was Jean-Luc Godard, who certainly didn’t disappoint. According to Wenders' commentary on the DVD, Godard first asked how much film was in the camera (about 11 minutes' worth), and then proceeded to talk for exactly the amount of time required, attacking television and Hollywood among other things. The funny thing is, while his name is familiar to me, I don’t think I've ever seen any of Godard's films, although I did spot a DVD of La Chinoise on sale the other day (along with a couple of Michael Haneke movies) and briefly considered buying it.

After that it was pretty much downhill all the way, with few of the other directors having much of interest to say. At least Werner Herzog did something a bit different by taking off his shoes and socks. He was also the only interviewee to switch off the TV in the hotel room, which Wenders had left switched on before the start of each interview.

Well, whadya know. Here's the entire Jean-Luc Godard segment on YouTube. Love the music at the end!

The Sea at L'Estaque

Drizzle. Got up at around six thirty and watched the final hour or so of the cricket. Surprisingly considering our poor form of late and the injuries to three of our key players we beat England. We even ended up top of our pool. Better still, two of our nemeses, Sri Lanka and South Africa, are out of the tournament.

Checked my email. The work I was expecting to arrive over night hadn't come in, so I decided to go for a walk. Toyed with the idea of going to Riccarton, but eventually decided to head into town. Lovely flowers along the way. Sale at Country Road. Tried on some jackets, but nothing fit. Stopped at Alice in Videoland where I hired a Werner Herzog documentary, Wheel of Time, and a set of three Wim Wenders documentaries, including Tokyo-Ga (1985). The latter includes a scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower. Here it is on YouTube without any subtitles. I have no idea what he's on about but it sounds important.



Went to a Japanese supermarket and bought some umeboshi for Mrs Fool, who's feeling poorly. Thinks she's coming down with a cold. Also went to the library. Surprised to find they had a copy of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, which I was about to order from Amazon. Unfortunately it was on loan.

On the way home I noticed how green the Port Hills looked. Green and brown. I tried to paint a copy of Paul Cézanne's The Sea at L'Estaque, but I couldn’t reproduce the colors. For years the painting (in acrylics on a large piece of cardboard) remained unfinished, hidden behind the sofa in the living room. Another project abandoned. Another dream unrealised.

Of reading and watching DVDs

The three books I ordered from Amazon at the start of August arrived early (they weren't supposed to get here until September, but they turned up in mid-August), so for a while I found myself in the highly unusual (for me) position of reading three things at the same time; two of the Amazon arrivals and Nelson deMille's The Charm School, an old favourite I was in the middle of rereading when the Amazon parcel arrived.

I've since polished off the DeMille and Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice. The latter, an account of the film director's 1974 journey on foot from Munich to Paris, was a little disappointing. At first I found the unusual writing style refreshing. Some of Herzog's antics also brought a smile to my face. For example, at night he usually sought shelter in barns or broke into abandoned houses or deserted holiday homes, always careful to cause as little damage as possible. In one of these homes he found a partially solved crossword puzzle on a table, which he completed before leaving the next morning. Many of the descriptions (of encounters with people he met or observed along the way, and in particular of the sense of separation that often accompanied such encounters; of aspects of the slowly passing countryside; of the state of his feet and groin) I could identify with. Some, like the following, verged on the poetic.

At the market was a boy on crutches, leaning against the wall of a house as my feet refused to cooperate anymore. With a single, brief exchange of glances we measured the degree of our relationship.

Once the novelty wore off, however, the writing style (and at times the translation) became a bit off-putting. Often it was difficult to distinguish real-time events from dreams, hallucinations, and memories of past events. Take the following passage, for example, in which Herzog describes reaching the Seine.

I could swim the rest of the way. Why not swim along the Seine? I swam with a group of people who fled from New Zealand to Australia - in fact I swam in front, being the only one who knew the route already. The only chance the refugees had of escape was to swim; the distance, however, was 50 miles. I advised people to take plastic footballs with them as additional swimming aids. For those who drowned, the undertaking became legendary before it even began. After several days we reached a town in Australia; I was the first one to come ashore, and those who followed were preceded by their wristwatches, which drifted half underwater. I grabbed the watches and pulled the swimmers ashore. Great, pathetic scenes of brotherliness ensued on shore. Sylvie le Clezio was the only one among them whom I knew. When it started to rain very hard again, I wanted to seek shelter in a roofed bus stop, but there were already several people there. I hesitated before creeping over to a school for cover.

Speaking of Herzog, so impressed was I with his documentary Encounters at the End of the World (which you'll remember I saw at the International Film Festival) that a week or so later I went out and hired two Herzog movies on DVD: Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn. The former was quite amazing. Full of stunning landscapes, touching encounters with wild animals, one very strange protagonist, and the same heavily-accented, dry narration by the director that I so enjoyed in Encounters. I love it that a conspiracy theory has emerged that this documentary is in fact a fake. You can read a bit about it at IMDB.

Rescue Dawn I didn’t really enjoy. I've been a fan of Christian Bale ever since I saw him in American Psycho, but he seemed miscast in the role of Dieter Dengler, and the acting in general (or maybe it was the script) I found less than convincing. There was a so-so "making of" documentary on the DVD, which showed that Herzog (now in his mid-60s) is still a very "hands on" director who doesn't like making his actors do things he himself isn’t prepared to do, whether it be eating live insects or swimming in rapids.

Along with these Herzog movies I also rented Ed Sullivan Presents The Beatles, a two-DVD set featuring the four episodes of the Ed Sullivan Show on which The Beatles appeared in 1964 and 1965. You may recall that one of the other Amazon books I ordered was Revolution in the Head, a song-by-song analysis of all The Beatles' songs, so with this by my side I was able to read about each song as it was played on the show. Although I don’t remember ever seeing The Beatles "live" on TV as a youngster, some of the other acts they performed with on these shows definitely brought back childhood memories. There was Soupy Sales, familiar to me as a panelist on What's My Line, singing a corny song called "The Mouse". And there was Cilla Black. When I was a young boy, our whole family (perhaps with the exception of my rebellious eldest brother) would gather around the TV to watch her show, Cilla.

One thing I never knew (until reading about it in Revolution in the Head) was that that show's theme song, "Step Inside Love", was a Paul McCartney composition. In fact Cilla's connection with The Beatles was quite deep. According to Wikipedia, she started out as a cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club in Liverpool where she used to give impromptu performances. John Lennon eventually introduced her to their manager, Brian Epstein, and persuaded him to give her an audition, where she was accompanied by The Beatles!

I still haven’t finished Revolution in the Head. When I took back the Ed Sullivan DVDs to Alice in Videoland I noticed they had The Beatles Anthology on DVD, so what I think I might do when I have some spare time (it's a five-DVD set) is hire that and read the entries for the songs as they're introduced in the documentary. This probably won’t be for a while. I started rewatching The Wire a few weeks ago, and I'm only halfway through season 3.

Mid-winter treats

Christchurch winters can be pretty miserable. Among the few things to look forward to at this time of year are the Christchurch Arts Festival and the International Film Festival. I eagerly await the publication of the programs for these festivals each year (or every two years in the case of the former, which is biennial) and love going through and circling the various events I want to attend. I then add up how much it's all going to cost, and go through the programs again, re-circling the events I really don't want to miss.

This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.

Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.

Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.

The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".

Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.

Hidden

Which art form reigns supreme? That's a question I gave some thought to a while back. I decided that I probably agreed with those who ranked music above the other arts on the grounds that it tends to move people more often and more deeply than other art forms. It's certainly the art form I'd least like to go without.

However, I also rate film highly. The filmmaker's task involves creating an entire alternative universe that must be completely plausible if the film is to succeed. No small feat. And perhaps why so many film directors appear somewhat authoritarian if not downright megalomaniacal, especially when working on the set. Another reason why I rate film highly is that while famous musicians or contemporary artists, for example, sometimes come across as rather shallow or uninspiring when interviewed, in the same situation leading film directors usually come across as extremely articulate and knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects.

On Saturday I watched Michael Haneke's Hidden on DVD. Among the extras were an interview with the director, an excellent "making of" which was a cut above the kind of thing you usually find among the extras on DVDs peppered with interviews in which the actors and director gush about how wonderful they all are and how delighted they are to be working together, and a revealing documentary about Haneke. The impression I was left with after watching these was of an intelligent, thoughtful, rather mild-mannered individual who, while wary of media attention and aware of the need to control how he's presented in the media, is extremely open when discussing his work in public. On the set, however, he displays glimpses of the same authoritarian style employed by other directors. To be fair, no other art form involves coordinating as many resources, both human and non-human, as filmmaking. Perhaps a degree of authoritarianism is essential if a director is to handle all this and realize his artistic vision.

The film was excellent by the way. The plot involves a protagonist whose life starts to fall apart after he's forced to recall his vile treatment as a six-year-old of an Algerian boy who was orphaned as a result of the Paris massacre of 1961. Although mentioned only in passing, this massacre, in which up to 200 peaceful Algerian protestors were killed by French police, some drowning after being violently herded into the River Seine, is pivotal to the film, which on one level is an allegory of France's treatment of the incident. The same incident was mentioned in a book I read recently, although I can’t remember which one. It might have been The Game of War.

I'm currently reading Chalmers Johnson's Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which includes an account of the Kwangju massacre of 1980, in which a similar number of civilians were killed by South Korean troops. It's interesting how such incidents are quickly forgotten when they occur in Western countries or countries allied to the U.S., whereas we're constantly reminded by our media and politicians of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 42km
Days left until departure: 83

Christchurch - Osaka

I got up just before 3am, having woken at around 1am and been unable to get much sleep after that. Things weighed on my mind. I'd done almost no training for the last two weeks. I had blisters on both heels from my new shoes. Would I really be able to keep my pack under 10kg? I had an unsightly bright red scab-like thing on the side of my nose where my doctor had treated a solar keratosis with liquid nitrogen.

One of these weights was lifted when I got to the airport at around 4.30am and placed my pack on the scales at check in. It weighed just 8.5kg!

Both the flight to Auckland and the one on to Kansai were largely uneventful. The seat beside me on the Kansai flight was vacant, but the one next to that was occupied by a young Japanese woman who coughed intermittently (without putting her hand over her mouth) throughout the entire flight. As if the fear of being struck down by a reoccurrence of my ingrown toenail or groin problem wasn't enough, I now had to worry about catching a cold.

There were at least three or four movies I wanted to watch on the plane. I started with Die Hard IV, which was a huge disappointment. The words formulaic and unoriginal spring to mind. A pity, since I enjoyed the first two. I then watched The Flying Scotsman, a biopic about world champion cyclist Graeme Obree, who was bullied as a child and suffered mental health problems throughout his life. I followed this with the Joe Strummer doco and an episode of Flight of the Conchords. The rest of the flight I spent eating, sleeping, listening to John Coltrane's Blue Train, and reading Alex Kerr's Lost Japan, which had been sitting on my bookshelf unread since being given to me years ago by one of my brothers (I forget which one). It's an excellent read. I highly recommended it.

The plane arrived at Kansai slightly ahead of schedule. I breezed through immigration and customs and caught the 5.45pm "limousine" bus to Herbis Osaka, just a couple of minutes on foot from my hotel in Nishi-Umeda, where I was checked in by 7pm. After freshening up, I went out to look at clothes at the new Mont Bell store by Nishi-Umeda station. On my way back I bought some "crisps" at the convenience store across the road from the hotel to eat in my room. I checked at reception to see which channel the Rugby World Cup final was on before going to bed at around 9pm.

Endurance

When it comes to embarking on epic journeys and making some art along the way, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything rivaling Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to the Antarctic, which was documented so magnificently on film and in photographs by Frank Hurley. If you're unfamiliar with this incredible story, it goes like this.

In August 1914, Shackleton set sail from Plymouth on The Endurance bound for Antarctica, where he hoped to become the first person to cross the frozen continent on foot. The expedition reached the Weddell Sea in January 1915, but the pack ice closed in, and in October that year The Endurance was crushed. The crew salvaged what they could from the ship and after camping on the ice and making several unsuccessful attempts to flee on sleds, they boarded three lifeboats and sailed to Elephant Island, a voyage of seven days.

From there, Shackleton and five crew members set out on one of the lifeboats across some of the most treacherous seas in the world for South Georgia, some 1500km away, in a voyage that's been described as one of the most remarkable maritime crossings ever undertaken. After 14 days they reached the southern coast of South Georgia, but their journey still wasn't complete. To get from where they landed to the populated northern coast of the island, they had to cross an uncharted mountain range.

Shackleton and two crew members eventually made it to the whaling town of Stromness. From there they organized the rescue first of the crew members on the southern coast of South Georgia, and then of the crew members still stranded on Elephant Island. All 22 men left behind had survived, and were picked up in August 1916, some four months after Shackleton left Elephant Island, and two years after they originally set out from England.

If you're interested in this story, you should try to get hold of The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, a stunning documentary (available on DVD) featuring footage and photographs taken by Hurley.

Distance walked since last post: 9km
Total distance walked since blog began: 673.8km
Days left until launch of Kisokaido Project: 27